Lawmakers push limit on gun magazines

Measure awaits vote in Senate, where Sweeney now favors it

Mar. 27, 2014

Louis Greenwald

Written by

Andy McNeil

Courier-Post

Loretta Weinberg

TRENTON — State Assembly Majority Leader Lou Greenwald recalled feeling nostalgic when he saw former Phillies manager Dallas Green appear on TV a few years ago.

But instead of happily reliving the team’s 1980 World Series victory, the baseball legend broke down.

Green’s 9-year-old granddaughter was among six people killed by a gunman at a January 2011 event for U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a Tucson, Ariz., grocery store. The congresswoman was among 13 wounded.

“It resonated with me, and it’s another example that this could happen to anybody,” said Greenwald, D-Camden. “I can’t tell you how many times I was in a setting like that with my mom.”

That feeling returned again the following year with the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting. And then the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn.

The shootings prompted Greenwald to work on legislation that would limit the capacity of ammunition magazines. He is a primary sponsor of a bill seeking to curb that number from 15 to 10.

The bill (A-2006) passed the Assembly 46-31 last week. The legislation previously passed the Assembly in February 2013, but stalled after it wasn’t brought up for a vote by state Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney.

Sweeney, D-3, has since made public his support of the legislation after meeting earlier this year with parents who lost children at Sandy Hook.

For Greenwald, meeting with the Sandy Hook parents struck a chord.

“In my 18-plus years of public office ... it’s one of the most tragic and memorable and most meaningful things that I’ve ever done,” he said.

“You can’t help but be touched,” said Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, D-37, a sponsor of similar legislation in the Senate. “I mean, you’re looking at people who have been through the most horrendous thing that anybody could go through.”

Weinberg recalls being moved when the parents spoke about the number of children who escaped when the gunman had to reload, theorizing if he had been forced to do so earlier, more may be alive today.

But gun-rights advocates contend legislators should be targeting criminals, not lawful gun owners.

“Those bent on doing evil are going to do evil regardless of what tools are available,” said Scott L. Bach, executive director of the Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs. “Criminals and madmen ignore hardware bans — the only ones affected are good citizens who are rendered increasingly defenseless.

“This feel-good legislation makes no one any safer and will turn tens of thousands of legal gun owners into felons with the stroke of a pen.”

Gun owners expressed displeasure with the bill at an Assembly hearing this month. Among those who testified was Alexander Roubian, vice president of the New Jersey Second Amendment Society.

“They can’t even keep basic firearms out of the hands of criminals and mentally deranged individuals,” he said. “So how do they expect to control the types of magazines that criminals and mentally deranged individuals are going to acquire?”

Roubian called on officials to enforce the existing laws instead of making new ones.

The bill has some concessions, including an amendment to allow tube-fed .22-caliber rifles — often used by groups such as the Boy Scouts of America — to hold 15 rounds.

“These are not high-caliber weapons that would cause mass violence and destruction in a rapid fashion,” Greenwald explained.

The bill has yet to be scheduled for a vote in the Senate, but Weinberg doesn’t expect any snags.

Greenwald couldn’t speculate on what Gov. Chris Christie would do when the bill reaches his desk. When asked about it at a town hall meeting earlier this month in Mount Laurel, Christie didn’t indicate how he would respond to new gun control measures but said he’d wait for the Legislature to bring a final bill to his desk before making a decision.

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